Akbar's Administration: Mansabdari System, Revenue and Provinces

Making of Akbar's Administration, 1556 to 1605

From Bairam Khan's Regency to the Ain-i-Akbari

Akbar's institutions of government took their final shape in the 1570s and 1580s and survived with little structural change into the early eighteenth century. Akbar's court historian Abul Fazl described the whole apparatus in the Ain-i-Akbari, the Ain for short.

Akbar's administration was built step by step over his long reign, and several of its parts were tried, dropped and remade before they settled.

Central Administration Under Akbar: The Emperor and His Ministers

The Emperor and the Decline of the Vakil

The emperor (padshah) stood at the apex of the political, military and symbolic order of the Mughal state. Akbar made no commitment to a permanent capital. His court, chancery and treasury moved from city to city with him, and from 1571 to 1585 he ruled from Fatehpur Sikri, the city he built near Agra.

The Mughals inherited from the Timurids and the Delhi Sultanate the idea of an all-powerful minister, the vakil, who stood between the ruler and the administration. Bairam Khan governed the empire in this office while Akbar was a minor. After the 1560s the vakil's post survived as the highest dignity of the empire but lost its working power. Akbar placed the executive work of government instead in four great departments, each checking the others, so that no single minister could again control the whole state.

The Four Ministers: Diwan, Mir Bakhshi, Mir Saman and Sadr

The four ministers of Akbar's central government divided the work of the state between them.

• Diwan: The diwan (in full diwan-i-kul, the chief diwan) headed the revenue and finance ministry, the vizarat. He supervised assessment, collection, the offices of the khalisa and the jagirs, and the payment of salaries, and every important fiscal order carried his seal. Raja Todar Mal, who held the office under Akbar, became its model.
• Mir Bakhshi: The Mir Bakhshi headed the military department. Every order granting a mansab passed through his office, and his seal stood beside the diwan's on completed orders. He presented candidates to the emperor in open court and kept the records of branding and verification.
• Mir Saman: The Mir Saman, also called the Khan-i-Saman, was the high steward of the imperial household. He controlled the palace establishments, the stores and the karkhanas, the imperial workshops.
• Sadr-us-sudur: The sadr-us-sudur headed the religious and judicial establishment. He recommended qazis for appointment and administered the madad-i-maash, grants of land revenue made to scholars, Sufi lineages and families of established learning for their subsistence.

The division of power did not stop at the ministers. Within each department, subordinate officers held their own responsibilities and countersigned documents, so that they checked their own superiors.

The Mir Bakhshi was not a commander-in-chief. Akbar kept strategy and the choice of field commanders to himself, and the Mir Bakhshi's work lay in recruitment, recommendations of rank and the fixing of pay.

Justice and Public Morals: Qazi and Muhtasib

Justice in the Mughal Empire followed the Hanafi school of Islamic law, administered by the qazi, the judge. Suits between Muslims, and any serious criminal case with a Muslim party, went to the qazi's court, and a mufti gave the legal opinion on which the judgment rested. Qazis formed a loose hierarchy, from the judge of a pargana up to the chief qazi attached to the moving court, and were appointed on the sadr's recommendation. The qazi's seal also authenticated deeds and revenue records, and non-Muslims made regular use of these courts.

A separate officer, the muhtasib or censor, watched over public morals and the market. Above all the courts stood the emperor himself, who heard appeals rather than cases at first instance. There was no regular ladder of courts in the modern sense, so justice depended a great deal on the officer and on the access a subject could get.

Mansabdari System: Ranks, Pay and Military Duty

How Akbar Introduced the Mansabdari System

Akbar introduced the mansabdari system, which combined military organisation with civil administration. The word mansab means "rank" or "office", and its holders were the mansabdars. A mansab conferred no particular office, and its holder could be posted to almost any branch of government. Civil officers were drawn from these military ranks, so the army, the nobility and the civil service formed a single hierarchy covering every public service except the judiciary.

The ranks were decimal, an inheritance from Mongol and Timurid practice, and the system grew out of the abuses of Akbar's early reign, when officers paid to keep cavalry sold their horses, served on foot or brought worthless or borrowed mounts to the muster. The system took shape in the 1570s, although historians disagree whether it began at one moment in that decade or grew over the second half of the reign.

The mansabdars kept the elephants, horses, camels and troops their rank required. The emperor could therefore assemble an army at short notice without maintaining a large permanent central army, and regular inspections enforced the rules.

Zat and Sawar: The Dual Rank of a Mansabdar

From about 1595, in the later years of Akbar's reign, a mansab was stated as two numbers. The zat (literally "person" or "self") fixed the holder's personal rank and his personal pay. The sawar ("trooper") fixed the cavalry contingent he had to maintain and the money he received for it. A rank was written, for example, as 4,000/3,000, meaning 4,000 zat and 3,000 sawar.

Three conventions governed the pair:

• Zat higher or equal: The zat number was normally equal to or higher than the sawar number.
• Precedence by zat: Seniority among nobles followed the zat alone, so a man rated 4,000/2,000 outranked one rated 3,000/3,000.
• Title from zat: A mansabdar's title came from his zat, so a man of 1,000 zat and 500 sawar was styled hazari, "commander of a thousand", though his contingent was half that size.

Historians explain the dual rank differently. Douglas Streusand and Jos Gommans see it as a way to give court officers high status without large followings, since a single number could not express both honour and real military strength. W. H. Moreland held that officers with high titles had seldom kept contingents to match, so the zat came to fix a man's place in the hierarchy while the sawar checked his actual strength. John F. Richards holds that under Akbar the sawar rank still matched the cavalry actually mustered.

Grades of Mansab and the Classes of Mansabdars

The ladder of ranks ran from the commander of ten (dahbashi) to the commander of ten thousand (dah-hazari), and every command above 5,000 was reserved for the emperor's sons. The Ain-i-Akbari counts 66 grades, matching the numerical value of the letters of the name of God, but Heinrich Blochmann, who translated its first volume, concluded that only about 33 of them ever existed in reality. In 1595 mansabs were held by 1,823 men.

Not every mansabdar was a noble. Under Akbar the threshold of nobility is usually placed at 500 zat, so that all nobles, or amirs, held mansabs but not all mansabdars were nobles. Within each rank the Ain set three classes by how closely a man's contingent matched his rank:

• First class: The contingent equalled the rank.
• Second class: The contingent was half the rank or more.
• Third class: The contingent was less than half the rank.

Monthly pay varied with the class, which gave mansabdars a reason to keep their contingents full.

Through the grant of mansabs Akbar also reshaped the nobility, bringing Rajputs, Indian Muslims and Afghans in beside the Turanis and Iranis. High ranks for Rajput chiefs, with lesser mansabs for their kinsmen, were central to Akbar's Rajput policy.

Dagh, Chehra and the Muster of Troops

Two devices checked that the mansabdars kept the men and horses they were paid for. The chehra was a descriptive roll of each horseman, recording his age, height, complexion, features and marks, his place of origin, his caste or tribe, and his own and his father's names, with the horse's breed, colour and marks entered separately. The dagh was the brand placed on each horse, the imperial mark on one side and the mansabdar's own on the other, so that animals could not be moved from one contingent to another for the day of inspection.

Akbar began with the descriptive roll alone and made pay depend on it. When horses matching a written description were still hired and substituted, branding was added about 1573, when Shahbaz Khan Kambu became Mir Bakhshi; it revived the practice of Alauddin Khalji and Sher Shah. The Mir Bakhshi's office inspected mansabdars, troopers, mounts and equipment, and pay was released only after his certificate.

The rules fixed the horses as well as the men. When the Ain was drawn up, a standard body of ten troopers consisted of three men with three horses each, four with two and three with one, so that ten riders brought twenty horses between them. A set share of troopers had to bring an extra horse as a remount, a spare mount. Horses had to be of the larger Central Asian or Persian breeds rather than ordinary local mounts.

Jagirdari System: Paying the Mansabdars

Cash Salary, Jagir and Khalisa

A mansabdar's total claim had two parts, a personal salary on his zat and a much larger allowance on his sawar for maintaining his cavalry. Some mansabdars were paid in cash (naqdi), but most were paid through a jagir, an assignment of the land revenue of a stated number of villages or of a pargana in place of a salary. Mansabdars paid this way were also known as jagirdars.

Because a jagir had to be worth the salary it paid, each unit of territory carried a standing assessment, the jama. The jagirdar could collect the whole revenue due to the state from his area, chiefly the land revenue, and nothing more. He held no rights of ownership, no judicial powers, which belonged to the qazi, and, if he was a small assignee, no police powers, which belonged to the faujdar.

The revenue not assigned in jagir formed the khalisa, which flowed directly to the imperial treasury. The khalisa was a pool of revenue rather than a fixed block of land near the capital. Out of it the emperor met the costs of his household, his own troops and the cash salaries of lesser mansabdars. Its share changed over time, and in Akbar's thirty-first regnal year (1586‑1587) it took about a quarter of the assessed revenue of Delhi, Awadh and Allahabad.

Akbar tested the balance between jagir and khalisa in 1574. He paid officers in cash, brought the imperial territories under the khalisa and divided them into circles, each expected to yield about a crore of dams, the copper coin in which revenue was reckoned. The 182 officers placed over these circles were called karoris, after the crore. The experiment was reported to cause hardship and revenues fell, and jagirs were assigned again; the karori scheme was given up by 1582.

Transfer of Jagirs and the Watan Jagir

A jagir was transferable and not hereditary. Every jagir except a watan jagir could be moved every three or four years, so that no officer struck roots in one region. Akbar established the practice firmly when he removed the entrenched Atka clan from the Punjab in his thirteenth regnal year (1568‑1569). Both the mansab and the jagir were held at the emperor's pleasure, and at a mansabdar's death his rank and titles did not pass to his sons.

The watan jagir stood outside this rule. It was the home territory of a Rajput chief admitted into imperial service, assigned to him as his jagir and reckoned against his salary, and it remained in his line. Rawal Kalyan of Jaisalmer, for example, received a mansab of 2,000 zat and 1,000 sawar and was assigned Jaisalmer itself as his pay.

Mansabdari and Jagirdari: Rank Against Assignment

The mansabdari and jagirdari systems were two halves of one arrangement, and they are often confused. The mansab was the rank, which fixed status, pay and military duty. The jagir was one way of paying that rank, an assignment of revenue that could be changed while the rank stayed the same.

Zamindars: Hereditary Rights in the Countryside

The zamindars were a different group altogether. They were landed proprietors of the countryside, men of superior status in rural society, who lived off agriculture without taking a direct part in production. Their status came partly from caste and partly from the services, khidmat, that they performed for the state, chiefly the collection of revenue on the state's behalf, for which they were paid. A zamindar who failed in that service could be dispossessed.

Zamindars held extensive personal lands called milkiyat, meaning property, which they could sell, bequeath or mortgage. Their right was hereditary, and their claims ranged from a share in the harvest of a single village to the lordship of a large tract. Most of them had forts (qilachas) and armed contingents of cavalry, artillery and infantry. The Ain-i-Akbari puts their combined strength at 3,84,558 cavalry, 42,77,057 infantry, 1,863 elephants, 4,260 cannons and 4,500 boats.

Revenue Assignments Before and Beside the Mughals

The jagir was one of several systems in medieval India that paid for soldiers by assigning revenue.

Many features of the amara-nayaka system were probably derived from the iqta of the Delhi Sultanate, and the Vijayanagara kings, like the Mughals, sometimes transferred their commanders from one place to another.

Land Revenue System of Akbar: Todar Mal and the Zabt

Sher Shah's Legacy and Raja Todar Mal

Land revenue was the economic mainstay of the Mughal Empire, and the office (daftar) of the diwan supervised the whole fiscal system. Akbar's revenue system grew out of the measured assessment of Sher Shah, whose officers measured cultivated land village by village and fixed cash demands per bigha.

Raja Todar Mal, Akbar's revenue minister, had begun in Sher Shah's service, where he supervised the building of the fort of Rohtas. Under Akbar he was placed in charge of the imperial revenue administration in 1574, was appointed diwan-i-kul in 1585, and died at Lahore in 1589. Revenue policy in the first part of the reign was a series of experiments, among them the karori scheme, before Todar Mal's settlement of 1580.

Dahsala Settlement of 1580 Under Raja Todar Mal

The zabt system was the principal land revenue system of the Mughal Empire from the late sixteenth century. Under it the revenue on cultivated land was fixed in cash on the basis of measurement and per-unit rates, rather than as a share of each year's crop. It took its mature form in the dahsala, the ten-year settlement of 1580, and the Ain-i-Dahsala chapter of the Ain-i-Akbari describes how the ten-year assessment was calculated.

In 1580 Todar Mal grouped neighbouring parganas into revenue circles and had officials compile tables of measured area, yields and prices. For each pargana the yields and prices of the preceding ten years were averaged, and from the average a cash rate per bigha, the dastur-ul‑amal, was fixed for each crop. The averaged rate turned a fluctuating harvest into a predictable cash demand. The cultivator knew his liability in advance, and the state could count on its income.

Akbar's own instructions to the revenue collector, the amalguzar, asked him to make cultivators pay in cash while keeping the option of payment in kind open.

Measurement, Land Classes and the Revenue Demand

Measurement was standardised for the zabt. Akbar fixed the ilahi gaz, a yard of about 84 cm, as the standard unit of length. The bigha, the standard unit of area, was defined as 3,600 square ilahi gaz. Land was measured with the jarib, a measuring rope divided into graduated lengths. Both cultivated and cultivable land were measured in each province, and the Ain-i-Akbari recorded the totals.

The land was then classified by how continuously it was cultivated, and each class paid a different revenue. The classes were designed to encourage the recultivation of abandoned land and to discourage the withdrawal of productive land from cropping.

Polaj and parauti land were each divided into three grades, good, middling and bad. The produce of the three grades was added together and a third of the total taken as the medium produce, and one-third of this medium produce was exacted as the royal dues. Crops were grouped into the two harvests, the kharif (autumn) and the rabi (spring), and cash crops such as cotton and sugarcane, the jins-i-kamil or "perfect crops", carried higher rates than food grains.

Batai, Kankut and Nasaq: Other Methods of Assessment

The zabt was never imposed on the whole empire. It was the principal method in the northern subas, Agra, Allahabad, Awadh, Delhi, Lahore, Malwa and Multan, which together formed a zabt zone across the Indo-Gangetic plain. Elsewhere the older methods described in the Ain-i-Akbari continued.

Crop-sharing (batai) took three forms. In bhaoli the crops were reaped, stacked and divided by agreement; in khet-batai the fields were divided after sowing; and in lang-batai the cut grain was formed into heaps and divided. Crop-sharing gave the state a share of the real harvest, but it needed honest inspectors to watch the division. It prevailed in Berar and Khandesh, and Gujarat kept a system linked to the practice of its earlier sultans.

Jama, Hasil and the Records of Collection

Revenue arrangements had two stages, assessment and actual collection. The jama was the amount assessed, and the hasil the amount actually collected. A lasting gap between the two showed either over-assessment or weak administration, and could lead to a lower rate.

Collection ran through a fixed sequence of records:

1. Engagement: Once the assessment was made, the cultivator received a written engagement, the patta, stating the demand.
2. Acceptance: The cultivator gave in return a deed of acceptance, the qabuliyat.
3. Collection: The revenue was collected at harvest time and normally paid into the treasury through the amil, though Akbar's administration encouraged peasants to pay directly and entitled them to written receipts.
4. Record: The amil deposited copies of his accounts of collections, arrears and expenses with the qanungo, the registrar of the pargana.

The state also advanced taqavi loans for seed, cattle and the resettlement of deserted land through the chaudhuris and the village headmen, and allowed arrears to be repaid in yearly instalments. Accounts were kept in the copper dam, forty of which made one silver rupee, while the steady supply of silver coin made it possible for the state to collect so much of its revenue in cash.

Provincial Administration: Suba, Sarkar and Pargana

Twelve Subas of Akbar and Their Officers

The province, the suba (also written subah), was the largest unit of Mughal territorial administration. Akbar's administrative reforms divided the empire into twelve subas: Kabul, Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Agra, Awadh, Allahabad, Bihar, Bengal, Malwa, Ajmer and Gujarat. After his conquests in the Deccan he created three more, Berar, Khandesh and Ahmadnagar, so that the empire had fifteen subas by the end of his reign.

Each suba was headed by a governor, styled sipahsalar under Akbar and later commonly subahdar or nazim. Beside him the centre appointed a parallel set of officers who answered to the court:

• Provincial diwan: He ran the revenue of the suba. Though nominally under the governor's supervision, he answered to the imperial diwan at court and took his orders from there, and in 1596 Akbar ordered every provincial diwan to report his proceedings to the emperor.
• Provincial bakhshi: He handled the enlistment and muster of troops, passed pay bills and enforced the branding rules, and often also held the post of waqia-navis.
• Provincial sadr: He headed the qazis of the suba and signed their appointments.
• Waqia-navis: The news-writer reported everything that happened in the province directly to the court.

When Muzaffar Khan Turbati was made governor of Bengal in 1579, separate imperial appointments filled the offices of the provincial bakhshi, diwan, sadr and news-writer at the same time. The governor commanded, but the money, the muster and the news of his province lay with men who did not owe their posts to him.

Sarkar, Pargana and the Kotwal of the Cities

Below the suba came the sarkar, the district. Its executive head was the faujdar, a military officer responsible for order and for the safety of the roads, and its revenue was in the charge of the amalguzar. The faujdar was personally answerable for robberies in the country he was bound to secure. The Ain-i-Akbari lists Saran as one of the six sarkars of the suba of Bihar, and Purnea, a sarkar of the suba of Bengal on the frontier, was held as a military command under a faujdar.

The sarkar was made up of parganas, groups of villages. In the pargana the police and criminal-justice duties were combined in the shiqdar, civil justice belonged to the pargana qazi, and revenue to the amil. The amil worked with his clerks (karkun), the treasurer (fotadar), the qanungo and the patwari, a staffing pattern carried over from Sher Shah's administration.

Cities had their own officer, the kotwal. He was to be accessible to all without go-betweens, to keep a register of the townspeople ward by ward, and to run the watchmen and informers of the town.

Village Administration: Muqaddam, Patwari and Panchayat

The village stood at the base of the system, and its traditional structures of self-government continued more or less undisturbed under Akbar. The village panchayat was an assembly of elders, which in villages of mixed castes was usually a mixed body, and its decisions were binding on the members. It was headed by the muqaddam or mandal, the headman, and the patwari kept the panchayat's accounts.

The headman and the patwari linked the village to the state. Revenue engagements were signed through them and taqavi loans passed through their hands. In the zabt provinces most villages dealt with the state's revenue officers directly, something no earlier regime had achieved, and the pargana became a unit of imperial administration.

Ain-i-Akbari: The Main Record of Akbar's Administration

Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari and Its Five Books

Abul Fazl compiled the Ain-i-Akbari at Akbar's order as part of a larger history, the Akbar Nama, which had three books. The first two told the story of the reign, and the Ain-i-Akbari, the third, was a compendium of imperial regulations and a gazetteer of the empire. It was completed in 1598, the forty-second regnal year, after five revisions.

The Ain is made up of five books (daftars), of which the first three describe the administration:

• Manzil-abadi: The imperial household and its maintenance.
• Sipah-abadi: The military and civil administration and the servants of the state, with notices of the mansabdars, learned men, poets and artists.
• Mulk-abadi: The fiscal side of the empire, with revenue rates and the "Account of the Twelve Provinces", which gives each suba's geography, economy, sarkars, parganas, measured area and assessed revenue.

The fourth and fifth books deal with the religious, literary and cultural traditions of the people of India and contain a collection of Akbar's sayings.

For each sarkar the Ain gives eight columns of detail, from the pargana and its forts to the measured area, the revenue assessed in cash, the revenue granted in charity, the zamindars, their castes and their troops.

Value and Limits of the Ain-i-Akbari as a Source

The Ain is a mine of information on the Mughal Empire in Akbar's reign, because it set down systematically the varied customs and practices of his extensive territories. Compiling this information was itself an imperial exercise, since it informed the emperor about the lands he governed.

The Ain is also a view of society from its apex. Its central purpose was to present a picture of Akbar's empire in which social harmony came from a strong ruling class, and any revolt against the Mughal state was, in the author's eyes, bound to fail. What the Ain says about peasants is therefore a view from the top. It can be checked against revenue records from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and against the records of the East India Company for eastern India.

Significance and Limits of Akbar's Administrative System

Achievements of Akbar's Administration

Akbar's administration gave the Mughal Empire the institutions on which it ran for more than a century.

• Balanced centre: Power at the centre was divided among four departments that checked one another, and the vakil no longer stood between the emperor and the state.
• One imperial service: The mansab ranks joined the army, the nobility and the civil service in one hierarchy, and brought men of many origins under the emperor's direct control.
• Predictable revenue: The zabt fixed the land revenue in cash from measured land and averaged rates, so that both the peasant and the state knew the demand in advance.
• Checks in the provinces: Beside each governor the centre appointed a diwan, a bakhshi and a sadr who answered to the court.
• Lasting forms: The revenue offices of the successor states, and after 1765 the East India Company, took over the records of the zabt, and the Company collected its Bengal revenue through the inherited machinery of the province. Todar Mal's standard measures, land survey and settlement records became the base of the village land records that the British Raj improved and that Indian districts still keep.

Weaknesses and the Later Strain on the System

The same arrangements carried weaknesses that grew under Akbar's successors. The salary bill of the mansabdars was enormous, taking about four-fifths of the empire's assessed revenue in 1595‑1596. Contingents often fell short of their paper strength, and at musters men were found hired for the day with borrowed clothes and saddles.

The revenue demand was heavy. Older writers equated the state's share under Akbar's system with one-third of the produce, but the historian Irfan Habib, in The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963), showed that the working rates often rose above one-third and in some provinces approached or exceeded one-half. A jagirdar who held his lands for only three or four years had no long-term interest in their prosperity; under Akbar's successors this drove the effective demand higher, and the gap between the jama on paper and the hasil collected widened.

In the later seventeenth century the number of mansabdars outran the revenue available for jagirs. This mismatch, known as the jagirdari crisis, was one of the strains in the decline of the Mughal Empire after Aurangzeb's death in 1707.

Sources

• NCERT: Class 12 Themes in Indian History Book 2, Chapter 4
• NCERT: Class 12 Themes in Indian History Book 2, Chapter 3
• NCERT: Class 8 Exploring Society: India and Beyond Book 1, Chapter 2
• NCERT: Class 9 Understanding Society: India and Beyond Book 2, Chapter 3
• Wikipedia: Akbar
• Wikipedia: Government of the Mughal Empire
• Wikipedia: Mansabdar
• Wikipedia: Zabt
• Wikipedia: Subah
• Wikipedia: Ain-i-Akbari
• Wikipedia: Todar Mal
• Government of Bihar (Saran district): History
• Government of Bihar (Purnea district): History
• Government of Uttar Pradesh (Ghaziabad district): Land Records
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers